Accelerating Delivery for Global Leader in Engineering, Design

Challenge

AFRY’s workforce operated from a variety of geographic locations and were unable to collaborate and leverage their team expertise on large scale Revit based projects.

Industry

Architecture, Engineering & Construction

Solution

CloudFS allowed teams across multiple locations and time zones to work collaboratively, all accessing a single data source. Data Services gives the IT team a single view of the entire file system, making search, audit and analysis quick and easy.

Cloud

AFRY Drives Global Team Collaboration to Boost Productivity, Reduce Costs and Speed Profitability with Panzura

Since 1895, AFRY has connected technologies to provide profitable, innovative, and sustainable solutions for energy, industrial, and infrastructure markets. With 16,000 highly qualified engineers and 28,000 partners, AFRY has assignments spanning across 100 offices and just as many countries. As a global operation, AFRY needed to ensure that their global team was connected and working together to drive higher productivity and results.

Challenge: Distributed workforce creates inefficiencies and lower productivity

AFRY's talented and skilled personnel throughout the world were unable to collaborate and leverage their team expertise on large scale Revit based projects.

With different solutions at each site, the company had created islands of storage. These data islands made it virtually impossible for their 16,000+ employees to properly collaborate on projects across the globe and work as a single team. Each site had their own storage and backup procedures. They had different Revit models making it impossible to collaborate in real-time on existing projects as well as new ones.

Productivity was challenged as open times for the models was inherently slow in Revit Server and made it impossible to tap into unused design capacity in other locations.

This led to a lack of efficiency, effectiveness, and a waste of funds. The company desired an IT infrastructure that would enable their talented teams to come together on mega projects in real-time and move with speed to deliver projects on-time and on-budget.

As a multi-billion-dollar global engineering and design firm with over 30,000 employees and partners worldwide, speed and team productivity are critical to delivering world-class billion-dollar designs for our customers. With Panzura, we deployed ONE global cloud file system across all global sites, enabling engineers and designers to collaborate as ONE global team, dramatically increasing productivity and improving our bottom line.

Solution: One Global Cloud File System

AFRY decided to implement Panzura CloudFS to empower its teams across multiple locations and time zones. Working on Revit, one of the most demanding applications in a world that is not designed for use across distributed teams was made possible by CloudFS.

AFRY’s dispersed teams can now get full cross-site collaboration with complete Revit support to boost productivity significantly. They do this by consolidating data into a single source of truth and using Panzura’s global namespace and distributed global file locking, with which they can insure that designers can work on the “same” golden copy without worrying about overwriting with another designer.

Additionally, using byte range locking they can work on sub-elements of the projects.

CloudFS is the only solution that enables full use of Revit distributed over teams including use of workshare monitor. Now, not only are they able to leverage talent spread in different geo-locations but AFRY gained the ability to shift resources immediately to give the right project to the right designer.

Any office that had excess capacity of manpower could be channelized to an appropriate project or any project that needed a specialist from their team could contribute in real-time irrespective of the location. The ability to divert its workforce became a major advantage to their business

Benefits: Real-time collaboration with increased efficiency, reduced latency

AFRY team members working on a project in Sweden can easily collaborate with engineers in China who have the same project data cached locally at their site. This real-time collaboration reduced the latency associated with remote file access and increased efficiency so AFRY can readily work to make a difference for their clients.

Having consolidated data into a single version of truth, AFRY’s design teams get one global experience accessing files irrespective of their location and no longer struggle with data sprawl and versioning issues. Additionally, Panzura Data Services gives them a view over their entire file network from one dashboard.

In addition to empowering the organization via global collaboration, AFRY’s IT team can also sleep soundly knowing that the company’s data is properly backed up.

Summary

Since AFRY fully deployed CloudFS in September 2018, teams now enjoy greater productivity and collaboration across the company. Employees can work simultaneously on projects without risking overwriting data, experiencing latency, or having to fear that their data is not backed up properly.

Working alongside Panzura was as easy as it gets. It didn’t take long for the Panzura team to demonstrate the value they can bring to a customer, especially with a cloud-strategy and a data-driven culture. Panzura’s distributed file storage is a game-changer for any enterprise.